


Silent when you speak

by Yuu_chi



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Angst, Canon Abuse, Introspection, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-10
Updated: 2015-09-10
Packaged: 2018-04-20 02:41:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4770482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yuu_chi/pseuds/Yuu_chi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Ronan's dreams things do not break beneath his touch. Reality is not so kind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silent when you speak

In his dreams Ronan never breaks a thing.

He touches trees and the bark flowers; skims his fingers along grass and feels it shiver and grow. In his dreams his touch heals the things that are broken and gives life instead of hurt.

It does not make him feel powerful so much as worthy. For somebody like Ronan to have a gift like this still takes his breath away and he promises himself that he’ll never abuse it; give the forest and the grass and the trees reason to shy from him.

Ronan doesn’t want to lose this feeling, but more than that, he doesn’t want to become the kind of person who would be given something so perfect and fragile and feel it break in his hands.

His dreams are special. Sacred.

_Kind_.

Reality is not.

When Ronan touches things in reality they crumble. Places, things, people. His touch takes instead of gives.

For a long time Ronan doesn’t fight that. He wakes tired and sore and angry, unfurls his fingers to find the flowers he’d plucked in his dreams withered and torn in his grip, thorns in his skin and petals going grey on his pillows.

When he laughs people go pale. When he goes to touch they pull away. He throws bottles at walls to hear them shatter and takes roads too fast and the turns too sharp. He forces himself to delight in the way people look at him like a bomb and appreciate the way he can make skin go blue and black beneath his knuckles.

It’s fine like this. Ronan is fine like this. In his head everything is blue and green and gold and when he wakes the world is dirty blacks and greys and reds.

He meets Adam and suddenly the world is less fine.

Adam is blue eyes and blue bruises, red shirts and red lips. His hands blackened with oil and grease and brown-gold hair that never lays flat. His smile is thin and wary and whenever he laughs his shoulders creep up below his ears like he’s afraid somebody will call him on it.

Ronan can’t stop staring at him, wants to touch him like he’s never wanted anything before.

When he tries Adam flinches.

And Ronan learns to be gentle again. He teaches himself to take the gentleness of his dreams into his reality. He teaches himself to be worthy of the things around him like he is in his sleep. Fingers soft, hands slow; be careful to never startle and to never hurt.

It takes time; hands shaking as he elbows Adam gently in the ribs, heart pounding when he sits close enough to let their shoulders knock. Ronan is always prepared to be pushed aside. Eventually though Adam stops tensing when their skin brushes, leans in, even, when Ronan is near enough for it to be almost unconscious.

_Yes_ , Ronan thinks and he presses his smiles into the leather at his wrist.

It becomes an obsession, touching Adam. A part of Ronan is always afraid that he’ll break him, that the touch will go sour, but Adam is made of more resilient stuff. That makes him mad, sometimes, and Ronan tells himself part of it is for Adam too, because Adam deserves a touch that is meant to give comfort instead of fear.

(it’s not a lie either, because Ronan is slowly losing his head over this boy and he’s already dangerously close to wanting to give him the world.)

The first time Ronan dreams of Adam is a long time coming.

His skin is warm, rough and sun-speckled. He smiles against Ronan’s palm, tilts his head so Ronan can press his lips at the hollow of his throat. He tastes like gasoline and Cabeswater grass and each breath Ronan feels on his mouth reminds him how alive and fragile this boy is.

There are bruises still on his skin and Ronan touches them with his fingers, his lips, and watches them disappear.

He wakes breathless and hard and with a chill that trembles across his skin.

The next day Adam comes to school with finger shapes around his wrists and Ronan almost reaches for them before he realizes that he’s awake and his touch does nothing. It makes him mad all over again and he knows it’s not Adam’s fault but he can’t look at him for the rest of the day.

It’s useless to him to have this gift that can change nothing for Adam in reality; Adam who deserves everything Ronan has to give and more, whatever it is that Adam will take.

He dreams of Adam again but this time when Ronan reaches for him Adam pulls away and Ronan goes still.

“ _You can’t fix me_ ,” Dream-Adam says, “ _my bruises are not yours to take_.”

Ronan wakes with words still on his tongue;

_No, that’s not what I want_ , he thinks and he’s almost feverish. _I just don’t want you to hurt._

He’s never known an Adam without the breaks and bruises and he wants to so badly; he wants to give Adam room in his ribs for breath and a chance to smile without looking guilty for it.

The next day he volunteers to drive Adam home from school, nails deep in his skin as he scratches the knotted scars beneath his bands and his eyes fixed at a sprinkle of freckles that peer out beneath Adam’s hair.

“I’m working,” Adam says.

“After that, then,” says Ronan. He does not say _please_ but it is a very near thing.

Adam is quiet and Ronan makes the mistake of looking at his face where his eyes are thoughtful and narrowed. He’s trying to read the stiffness in Ronan’s shoulders and the things that are absent in his silences. Adam is very good at finding the things he looks for.

Ronan glances down at the ground.

“Okay,” Adam says after the moment stretches so long between them that it starts to groan under the weight of it. “Okay, you can drive me home.”

Ronan also does not say _thank you_ but it is also a very near thing.

It’s late by the time Adam is sitting in his car with his hands pressed against the heater for warmth. He looks more relaxed than he actually is, Ronan knows, because Adam has lying down to a fine art. Ronan, who is much the same, has long since learnt to recognize the signs.

It’s quiet and shadowy in the glare of passing cars and the blackness of the sky. Shapes ripple and move over Adam’s face and Ronan watches him out of the corner of his eye every time headlights wash him in yellow-and-grey.

He looks like the things Ronan sees in the water of Cabeswater when he dreams. Not the Nightmares, but the things Ronan can’t bring himself to look to closely at. The hem of his mother’s skirt, the flash of Matthew’s curls, the harsh lines of Declan’s chin, the hazy white of Noah’s smile, the width of Gansey’s shoulders –

( _Adam’s freckles, his long fingers holding a pen, the twist of his mouth in Latin, the pink of his tongue at his lips, the intensity in his eyes when he thought nobody was looking, the muscles in his stomach flexing, shirtless as he worked on the Pig, the warmth in his touch, the feel of his skin, the_ –)

Ronan’s hands tighten at the wheel and he’s reminded why he doesn’t like to look in the waters after all.

Beside him Adam shivers and without thought Ronan reaches to crank up the heat.

“Thanks,” he murmurs.

And Ronan says: “You should move out.”

The silence hits like a kick to the guts. He all but feels Adam close in on himself, shutting Ronan out and turning the warming air icy again.

Ronan, who had intended to say nothing at all, hates his inability not to break things after all.

“I would have thought,” Adam says, calmer than he is, “that you of all people would have understood.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Ronan asks and he tells himself it’s only because he’s driving that he doesn’t look at Adam, that it has nothing at all to do with how tight he has to grip at the wheel to stop his fingers shaking.

“Pull over, Lynch,” Adam says.

“What?”

“ _Pull over_.”

Ronan doesn’t even indicate as he rolls them to a stop, roadside gravel loud under the wheels. He puts the handbreak on and turns to look beside him.

He’d expected Adam to climb out of the car, make some valiant and stupidly stubborn attempt to walk himself out of the conversation. He’d seen it happen before with Gansey and Ronan has always been patiently waiting for the day it becomes his turn.

Adam does not get out of the car. It occurs to Ronan that, maybe, the relationship Adam has with Gansey is different from the one he has with Ronan.

“Well?” Ronan asks, aggressive and on edge, looking to pick a fight.

Adam doesn’t bite. He scans over Ronan with eyes too light and too blue in the dark, jaw set. He’s frowning and Ronan wants to take his thinned bottom lip between his teeth and he hates himself a little for it.

“What’s gotten into you?” Adam asks and he at least sounds a little angry to Ronan’s weird relief. “This is a Gansey conversation.”

“I’m not Gansey.”

“I noticed.” And then he says without as much as a blink: “You don’t care about this.”

Ronan stares at him. He thinks of the way Adam-in-his-dreams likes to be touched, how often he’d ran his hands through his hair and licked his way inside his mouth. He literally doesn’t even know what to say to that. He can’t do anything but stare.

The air between them is hot and prickly. Adam doesn’t break away.

Suddenly Ronan is angry. He’s angry a lot, but this is something else. “You can’t be this oblivious,” he says before he can get a check on the words. He aches to punch something, to thump at the steering wheel, but he has spent so long teaching himself not to scare Adam that he couldn’t even if he wanted to. “You literally cannot be this fucking dumb.”

Adam’s mouth thins further and he’s in Ronan’s space between one breath and the next. Up close Ronan realizes how many freckles Adam truly has, finds them fixating themselves in his memory so the next time he has Adam this close up in his dreams he’ll be able to trace them out with the tips of his fingers.

“I don’t know Ronan,” Adam says, and his voice is low. “Why don’t you tell me who the oblivious one is here?”

Ronan stares at him. His mouth is dry, his skin cold. In the background the heaters rattle too loudly and he can hear every breath that Adam takes.

They’ve never been this close while Ronan was awake before and Adam’s wearing an expression he’s never seen. He’s looking at Ronan like he expects something, like – _like he knows._

The moment between them is so thin and fragile that Ronan is afraid to move because he knows a little something about breaking things.

Adam’s eyes close and he sighs. He pulls back and sinks in his seat. He looks tired; not annoyed exactly, resigned maybe. He looks at Ronan and he doesn’t say anything but Ronan feels more like a coward than he’s ever felt before. His tongue is stuck on the roof of his mouth and he can’t speak.

“Forget it,” Adam says. “Just take me home, Lynch.”

Ronan does.

.

(the next day Adam comes to school with more bruises and he does not look Ronan in the eye – and Ronan continues to dream of things he cannot have.)

 

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be a drabble I was going to post on tumblr?? Things kind of... escalated.
> 
> [Update: Podfic by Rhea314 available here!](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6367756)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Silent when you speak by Yuu_chi [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6367756) by [Rhea314 (Rhea)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhea/pseuds/Rhea314)




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